I wonder if vibe coding is a bit like DIY plumbing. You can do it yourself a bit and then later when water starts gushing all over your bathroom you hire an emergency plumber at a high fee.

You learn a little more for next time.

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CSSer 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You could say that. Professional plumbers often love to use tools built to make the lives of DIY plumbers easier too though. The difference is they know when and when not to do so.

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Lu2025 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's worse. With plumbing, at least you can see what you are doing. Vibe code? One day, it just breaks and you don't know why.

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jstummbillig 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Unless, of course, there is a better AI at a future point, which is able to easily spot and correct the more underlying problems.

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HarHarVeryFunny 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Sure but in the software field a few years is a lifetime.

It's taken 8 years to go from introduction of the Transformer (attention paper) to today's LLMs, so I wouldn't be holding your breath waiting for something significantly different or more capable to replace it. It may well take AGI to replace a human "vibe coded mess" fixer-upper.

The technical debt you're building up by vibe coding your product may well become a boat anchor well before some product you are fantasizing about materializes to bail you out.

If you've somehow vibe coded an MVP good enough to push out to customers, and achieved some degree of success with it, then what you need to keep going is momentum - to be responsive to customer feedback, add new features, etc. If you've built such a poorly designed and flaky MVP that you can't rapidly iterate on it, then that is probably not going to go well.

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jstummbillig 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> It's taken 8 years to go from introduction of the Transformer (attention paper) to today's LLMs

I feel this position severely discounts the acceleration that is going on right now and our inherently limited abilities. Humans are not going to ever be significantly better at coding than they are today, and we can literally watch LLMs improve on it, by the month.

	▲	HarHarVeryFunny 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		We'll see. I think software development is one of the more challenging things that humans are capable of, and the challenge isn't because of something that computers have any advantage with due to computation speed or memory (unlike, say, chess). I wouldn't expect to see a human level AI software developer (not just "coder" - the easiest part of the job) until we have human level AGI. Run-time compute and agents seem to be responsible for most of the recent advances in capability - good ways to squeeze the most out of the underlying LLM paradigm, but not the path to AGI. We'll get there (AGI) one day, maybe in next 10-20 years, but in meantime if you want a vibe coded pile of sphaghetti to be cleaned up, it seems like it's going to be a job for a human.

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faangguyindia 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And on youtube, you can find many expert DIYer plumbers who go to greater lengths than pros.

	▲	eru 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Well, a pro is usually under time constraints. If you do something for a living, you have to work faster than if you are doing it as a hobby for fun.

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Yoric 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That probably depends on whether vibe coders do learn from the experience. I guess we'll see.

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hatmatrix 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's an apt analogy. It's like the realtor is under pressure to sell the house so does a quick and dirty DIY plumbing. Then when the house is sold you hire a real plumber to fix it right, hopefully before the gushing disaster.

Here, founders demo something that attracts the investors' or customers' attention - then they can clean it up later.